Didn’t they actually have a guy from Nicaragua run for President and never even checked it out? Róger Calero.
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Actually, 5 states DID check him out AND kept him off their ballots ...
And he was still allowed to run??? Good lord!
PROVING that the SCOTUS has to get involved here.
Almost all the Secretaries of States have NO RESPONSIBILITY to vet the candidates. This is left to the PARTIES.
That is unacceptable.
At the risk of repeating myself, I'll repeat what I said [ here ] :
Re "The Delegate Selection Rules for the 2008 Democratic National Convention"
So the concensus is appearing that:
(1) Absent some specific statutory duty (as, arguably, exists in NJ and is a stated ground in the Donofrio case), the Secretaries of State have no duty to verify that the candidates are eligible to serve; and,
(2) The only entity that even gives lipservice to verifying a candidate's, or President-elect's, eligibility is THAT CANDIDATE'S POLITICAL PARTY.
This is simply constitutionally gross.
There is no way in God's Green Earth that the framers or anyone else who loves this country or our Constitution would find it acceptable for an individual to be seated as President of the United States based, possibly, on a series of rubberstamp "verifications" made by political hacks who:
(1) Not only were *not experts in the issues raised by various fact patterns or in the law and its application to those facts,*
(2) But who had *every motivation and personal interest, good and bad, known to man* at stake in their decision on whether a particular candidate was eligible to serve as president; and,
(3) Then there be NO WAY TO CHALLENGE the party's compliance or process? Balderdash.
This would be like saying a racehorse can't be awarded the crown in the Kentucky Derby if it was given performance drugs.
But the only entity that (supposedly) determines if the racehorse was given performance drugs, and thus is not eligible to be declared the winner of the Derby, is the racehorse owners.
And the owners don't even have a defined procedure they must follow to make that determination, nor do they have any expertise in determining whether the racehorse was given performance drugs.
Moreover, the racehorse owners have every motivation and personal interest known to man at stake in their horse winning the race, regardless if he's had performance drugs or not.
Yet they sign off that the racehorse is eligible to compete and win and that's not challengeable? By anyone?
Is this any way to run a Constitution?